I have recently begun cataloguing the papers of James Cossar Ewart (1851-1933), who was Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh from 1882 to 1927. Cossar Ewart was a pioneering zoologist and animal breeder who is probably best remembered for his work on cross-breeding zebras and horses. This work, written up as The Penycuik Experiments (1899), was instrumental in disproving the long-held theory of telegony, which held that the a sire could ‘infect’ the dam he serves by influencing the genetic inheritance of the offspring of subsequent sires.

To disprove this, Ewart cross-bred a zebra stallion with various mares of different breeds, which produced foals with zebra-like stripes. The mares were afterwards mated with horses of their own breeds, but these offspring never showed any evidence of having been affected by the previous zebra sire.

Cossar Ewart was also the driving force behind the establishment of a lectureship in genetics (1911) at the University, the first in the UK. He is pictured above with one of his prized zebras – an image which has already proved to be one of our most popular, as seen here! 

More about Cossar Ewart and his zebras to follow…

Waddington photograph album: EUA IN1/ACU/A1/5/7

As this will be our last blog post of the year, we thought we’d post something suitably silly to get you in the Christmas spirit! These photographs of a ‘Drosophila ballet’ involving staff at the Institute of Animal Genetics were included in a photograph album presented to C.H Waddington at his 50th birthday celebrations in 1955.

As someone who worked closely with the fruit fly Drosophila (used frequently in genetics experiments), Waddington would no doubt have appeciated the ‘ballet’, which appears to involve various strains of the fly being pursued by a ‘researcher’. It obviously wasn’t all serious lab work at the Institute…

Festive greetings to everyone, and we’ll see you in 2013!

Institute of Animal Genetics collection (EUA IN1/ACU/A1/4/4)

Before this year draws to a close, it’s worth noting that 2012 marks the 190th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884). Born in what is now Hynčice, Czech Republic, he studied philosophy and physics before entering the Augustinian Abbey of St Thomas in Brno, where he taught physics. At the abbey, he studied meteorology and astrology, but also bred bees and plants.

The experiment for which he is most famed began with the testing of thirty-four varieties of the edible pea plant, followed by eight years of hybridization (1856–1863). Taking seven traits, Mendel followed the hereditary transmission of each, finding that clear statistical regularities emerged. His experiments led him to make two generalizations, the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, which later became known as Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance.

Mendel’s theories of inheritance were not widely accepted at the time, as it was commonly held that characteristics were passed on to the next generation by the traits of each parent blending together. It was not until the early 1900s, when scientists were seeking a successful theory of discontinuous (rather than blended) inheritance, that biologists began replicating- and rediscovering – Mendel’s work. He is now commonly credited as the ‘father of modern genetics’.

This photograph, depicting Mendel (back second left) with his fellow Augustinian friars, is in our Institute of Animal Genetics collection. It was gifted to C.H Waddington in 1965 by a colleague, Raimund Koci, when Waddington visited Brno. As a connection, Arthur D. Darbishire (1879-1915), who was one of the early scientists to attempt to combine Mendelian and biometrical theories in the study of heredity (and who repeated one of Mendel’s pea-crossing experiments), was the first incumbent of the Lectureship in Genetics at Edinburgh University before his early death in World War One. But more of that to follow!

As has been mentioned before on this blog, C.H Waddington’s wide-ranging interests also encompassed art, architecture and visual design. In 1969 he published Behind Appearance, a detailed study of the relationship between art and the natural sciences. But I for one was unaware that Waddington was a painter himself, so we were delighted recently when Dr Robert Root-Bernstein (Professor of Physiology at Michigan University who is researching scientists that are also artists) sent us images of some of Waddington’s artwork. They are mounted here with the kind permission of Waddington’s daughters, Professor Dame Caroline Humphrey and Professor Dusa McDuff. We hope you enjoy them!

Although the cataloguing of Waddington’s papers is complete, there is still some refoldering and reboxing to be done, to ensure that the material is stored in an archival-quality environment. During this process, one can often come across things one missed the first time around – such as this amusing ‘canon’, with words by Waddington and music by Ralph Alan Dale (an American doctor and Oriental acupuncture expert). (A canon, also sometimes called a ‘round’, is a contrapuntal composition technique which has a melody that is repeated after a certain duration.)

It appears that this highly alliterative piece was composed for a dinner party while Waddington was Einstein Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the early 1970s. I think you would be hard pressed to find a more ‘wordy’ set of lyrics:

It appears impossible to prevent the philoprogenitive propensities of persons peopling the planet with two times its present population of two timers.

The pressure to provide provender and prevent pestilence will be portentous.

People Science perceptive enough to empathize the problems and proposals will profit from a propitious posture to promote their personality potentials.

The querulous who merely question the qualifications of the scientific enquiry after quantity and quality will find that their eternal quest is querying whether their quasi quietude qualifies them for equality quashiokor quod’or the quietus unless these quandum Quixotes quite quit their queasy quibbling and take as quarry their quota of quotidian quiddities.

They will earn their quittance when they can qualify as equating ZBG with a quorum of the quick rather than an unquiet queue of the untimely quenched.

The instructions for performing this piece are almost as complex as the lyrics themselves:

The canon has two parts: the ‘p’ part and the ‘q’ part. The entire piece should first be performed in unison. Then part 1 begins alone. On reaching part II (the ‘q’ part), the second part enters at the beginning (the ‘p’ part). Both parts finish together on ending on the word ‘potentials’, the other ending on the word ‘quenched’. Repeat as many times as desired before ending.

For the more musical among you, it would be interesting to see how this piece sounds when performed – and not least how many times the performers were physically able to ‘repeat…before ending’!

With the cataloguing of C.H. Waddington’s papers now completed, my next task is to move on to the cataloguing of the papers of the Institute of Animal Genetics, which was housed in the handsome building pictured above.

The building’s architect was John Matthew of the firm Lorimer & Matthew, and construction took place 1929-1930. With its symmetrical design, Dutch gable, balcony and arched windows, the building is somewhat reminiscent of a country house.

In many ways, the ‘Institute’ was as much a concept as it was a building. As an organisation, its predecessor was the Department of Research in Animal Breeding, under the Directorship of Professor Crew. Originally housed in central Edinburgh, in 1924 the Department moved to the King’s Buildings site to the south of Edinburgh, before transferring to the newly opened Genetics Building nearby in 1930. At this point the Department itself became known as the Institute of Animal Genetics. As time went by however, this name became more attached to the building, which was to house numerous bodies and factions over the years, such as the Animal Breeding and Research Organisation (ABRO) and Waddington’s ARC Unit of Animal Genetics. The building, which still stands, has been renamed the Crew Building, and is now home to the School of Geosciences.

This picture was taken from a photograph album presented to Waddington in 1955 by his colleagues on the occasion of his 50th birthday celebrations at the Institute. The original photo album will be catalogued shortly, along with the rest of the Institute’s records.

Today’s picture marks the 37^th anniversary of Waddington’s death this week. As I am nearing the completion of the catalogue of his papers, it seems a doubly fitting time to reflect a little on the man he was.

Born in Evesham on 8 November 1905 and developing a love of fossils from an early age, Waddington (known to all his friends as ‘Wad’) went on to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge. After working in Operational Research during the Second World War, Waddington was appointed to two positions in Edinburgh: that of chief geneticist at National Animal and Breeding Research Organisation (NABGRO, eventually named ABRO), housed in the Institute of Animal Genetics, and the Chair of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh University. Waddington was to remain at the Institute of Animal Genetics for the rest of his life, barring a few years at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he held the Albert Einstein Chair of Science in the early 1970s.

Waddington is renowned for his developmental biology work and his proposal of such concepts as canalisation and epigenetics . However, his papers reveal the vastly full and varied life he lived outside of his research and publishing work, not least the number of societies and organisations with which he was involved. Wad was a great believer in the power of science to educate, inform and help prepare a better future, and he utilised biological and evolutionary reference models as a way of analysing issues concerning human population and health, as well as the environment. Wad also had a major role in the expansion of the biological faculty of the University of Edinburgh.

The items in the photograph above are part of the collection of material, letters, ephemera and pictures that were collected from Waddington’s desk after his death and have remained more or less in their original order to this day.

A lot more information about Waddington and our collection of his papers will be available via the online catalogue, hopefully appearing in early 2013. Watch this space!

Today’s item of interest is not from the Waddington collection, which is still being catalogued, although it is indirectly related to him. This trophy, now rather affectionately called by us “the Pigs’ Cup”, was awarded to the Institute of Animal Genetics in 1933 by the Scottish National Fat Stock Club (SNFSC) for “the best pen of pigs in classes 44-47”. This item came to us recently, along with several boxes of papers, from the King’s Building site located to the south of Edinburgh, where the Institute of Animal Genetics, established in 1919, was housed from 1924 onwards. Waddington himself did not come to the Institute until 1946, but the place was obviously active enough before his time to have gained this trophy!

Although this item is not currently part of the scope for ‘Towards Dolly’ (being a very recent acquisition), we hope to catalogue it and our many other genetics collections at a future stage. The ‘Pigs’ Cup’ demonstrates the continuous evolution of collections such as these. Considering the relatively recent history of genetics and the complex interrelationships between different genetics bodies and organisations in Edinburgh, new related collections are frequently coming to our attention – although they do not usually take quite this form!

As we saw on a post here two weeks ago, Waddington was very interested in exploring the processes by which the shapes and patterns of biological forms are brought into being (morphogenesis). These two pictures are part of a file relating to a short research project which Waddington conducted in collaboration with Russell J. Cowe, a programmer from the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, between June and August 1968. Cowe worked with Waddington on the simulation of molluscan shell patterns using Computer-Aided Design. This project involved a computer programme being written (in Fortran, and worked out on an Eliot 4130 computer) which attempted to simulate the pattern on the shell and so provide some idea of the rules controlling how pigment is deposited during pattern formation, particularly the random factor determining points of initiation of diverging lines of pigment. The computer programme contained parameters controlling the density of random points of pattern initiation and different parts of the developing shell, and the angle of divergence of the lines.

The results, which were published as a paper entitled ‘Computer Simulation of a Molluscan Pigmentation Pattern’ in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (Vol. 25, No. 2, pp 219-25, November 1969), appear strikingly imaginative and futuristic considering the early date in computer technology!